Courage To Come Back: Andy Bhatti makes it his life’s work to help young victims of sex abuse

Andy Bhatti visits Sophie’s Place, a child advocacy centre in Surrey for which he helps raise funds.Photo by
Ric Ernst

This is the first of six profiles on recipients of the 2015 Courage To Come Back Awards, presented by Coast Mental Health to six outstanding people who have overcome great obstacles and then given back to their communities.

Their inspiring comebacks will be celebrated at a gala dinner at the Vancouver Trade and Convention Centre on May 7.

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At the lowest depths of his addiction and life of crime that began before he was a teenager, Andy Bhatti estimated he was making $1,500 a day from robbing stores, committing fraud, shoplifting and break-and-entering.

All to feed his drug habit, which started when he smoked marijuana at 12 and eventually led to getting addicted to heroin and crack, drugs he used to escape the horror of being sexually abused by his Big Brother.

Now 34 and the single dad of an eight-year-old boy, Bhatti has been clean and sober for more than eight years and makes it his life’s work to provide refuge and help for young sex abuse victims. That’s earned him the 2015 Courage To Come Back Award in the addiction category.

Bhatti, wearing a “It Came From Hastings” T-shirt he earned by living on the Downtown Eastside Side for most of the years he spent in drugs and crime, from age 15 to 26, remembered a judge in one of his many appearances in court asking him why he stole.

He bluntly told him he stole 365 days a year, a minimum of 10 criminal acts a day, or 3,650 crimes a year, and that even if he sold the stolen goods for a small percentage point of what they were worth, he’d still be making good money.

“I’ve got a drug habit I need to support.”

The judge remarked on his honesty and asked if he sent him to treatment, would he go?

Bhatti agreed and was released to check into rehab on his own, but in his mind he was halfway to East Hastings to get high.

“I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this guy sure fell for my scam,’” said Bhatti in an interview at Sophie’s Place, a child advocacy centre in Surrey for which he helps raise funds.

“I would have told him whatever he wanted to hear,” he said.

Bhatti was in and out of jail over the years and at one point weighed 90 lbs. Throughout his life, he kept his deep, dark secret of being abused from the age of nine to 14 from everyone except four people he told only when he got high enough.

Three were men he confided in to enlist their help in murdering his abuser, a plot never carried out.

That’s where Bhatti’s addiction had taken him, conspiring to kill, and beating a fellow user who admitted to Bhatti that he had sexually abused his own girlfriend, violence he justified in his twisted mind.

During yet another stay in jail, to which he looked forward because it enforced periods of abstinence that allowed him to gain weight and lose the junkie look — so he could commit crimes when he got out — he realized he didn’t want to be sending his newborn son Christmas and Easter cards from jail as the other long-timers did.

He’d tried court-ordered treatment before but never with the intention of quitting until that day, Dec. 22, 2006, when he left jail for the last time.

He went straight to a meeting of recovered addicts or alcoholics and: “I told them I was addicted to violence and to crime and cocaine.”

Bhatti got hooked into that community and was invited to go ice skating and bowling, and to have Christmas dinner.

One fellow addict got him work as a labourer — his first job ever. Bhatti took a picture of his first paycheque for $400.

He reluctantly opened up to a fellow addict in recovery about his sex abuse, but wasn’t prepared to address it.

But by coincidence, around the same time, when he was still in his first year of recovery, a Vernon RCMP officer investigating sexual offences by his abuser contacted Bhatti to ask if he also had been abused by the man.

Const. Susan Kolibaba, in her letter to support Bhatti’s nomination, said: “Andy is truly a person that has faced adversity in the profoundest of ways, ... and has conquered ... insurmountable obstacles to create incredible opportunities not only for himself but society.”

Bhatti eventually got professional help and now works as an activist to encourage victims to address their abuse because, he said, it’s the secrets that keep people sick.

“A lot of people who were abused become drug addicts or alcoholics,” he said.

He’s worked with the B.C. Society for Male Survivors of Sex Abuse, Men of Hope and Survivors Supporting Survivors (supportingsurvivors.ca) for male and female victims, as well as Sophie’s Place, and now does interventions (andybhattiinterventions.com).

“If we talk about abuse, what happened to us, we will become free from feeling that we are alone,” he said. “Most survivors still believe it’s their fault they got abused.”

Among Bhatti’s efforts to raise funds for charity was a bike ride from Vernon to Vancouver.

And after getting a call from a mother in Newfoundland whose son was sexually abused by a Big Brother, he’s set to do a 1,200-kilometre bike ride in Newfoundland this summer to raise funds and awareness.

“I realized there was little help in St. John’s and I decided to carry the message of hope there as well,” he said.

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